In International Lonely Guy (2010), Miller uses the screen printing process, that is synonymous
with the most famous artist to work with this technique Andy Warhol.
This process allows you to develop a finished print in almost identical fashion to the original artwork, however, each print will have minor differences, which ensures that every print maintains its status as an original work forming part of an edition. Andy was a major influence on Harland Miller’s artistic career and the idea for the Penguin series came from Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup series.
Miller explains: “I suppose it was a bit like Warhol's Campbells Soup Can's being about what he ate for dinner every day - these Penguins were what I ended up reading every day, because I was living in Paris and I'd bought a bunch of them second-hand - it was all I could get my hands on. But they were good, and while I was living in Paris I'd also picked up stories about Fitzgerald, and about his and Hemingway's time there.” The Northern Hemingways was born from these.
The American painter Ed Ruscha is another obvious and acknowledged influence: his work is celebrated for its juxtaposition of words and images; gnomic shout-lines and slogans scroll across the surface of his paintings. Ruscha is pre-eminent among the "cool school" of west coast US artists. Miller (born in 1964) is from the north of England and his work is self-consciously gauche, knowing and nostalgic, suffused with a sort of wind-whipped, end-of-the-pier melancholy.
Rags to Polyester - My Story, Whitby - the Self-Catering Years, Bridlington - Ninety Three Million Miles From the Sun. These are titles that suggest beery-breathed English comics like Albert Modley and Frank Randle; at the same time, because of the way they're painted, they evoke Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and other abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s - another disappeared world.
